Advanced Flight Testing That Gets You Off the Ground

Validation of aircraft performance and behavior is a critical step in ensuring aircraft flightworthiness and safety. ATA's expertise and advanced flight testing methods give you peace of mind.

Flight test programs often require specialized instrumentation for measuring, recording, and transmitting flight performance characteristics to the ground where they can be analyzed to ensure that the test conditions are safe. The aircraft environmental state (altitude, air speed, fuel-state, etc.) is identified along with the accelerometer, strain, and other dynamic response information to determine whether there are any potential dynamic instability concerns.

Flight testing can be a time‑consuming and expensive proposition depending on the level of testing required and if telemetry systems are used. ATA has been able to implement cost-effective flight test systems for specialized situations where real-time telemetry data are not required. ATA is able to provide innovative solutions to acquire and process all types of flight testing data without requiring expensive software and hardware solutions. Each customer’s flight test program is different, so we have the ability to quickly and efficiently develop custom software tools based on our IMAT toolkit for MATLAB.

Flight Test Support

ATA engineers are highly qualified in data collection and signal processing and can assist in the flight test data analysis process. We have worked with multiple customers in collecting, processing, and analyzing dynamic flight test data. Our engineers can participate at the flight test facility or support data analysis from our offices. We are experienced in using the IADS software and have also developed customized data analysis tools, using our IMAT (MATLAB-based) software to quickly process and analyze flight test data.

Hardware

Flight testing requires a variety of equipment to measure, record, and transmit data from the aircraft. ATA can provide complementary hardware for the flight test program; in some cases, this includes providing a complete flight instrumentation package. We can also help by evaluating and implementing specialized data systems. ATA has supported flight test programs where aircraft altitude has exceeded 50,000 feet.